Before you board an international flight, there’s a good chance your passport won’t be systematically inspected at the airport to make sure you are who its says you are.

But as we have learned in the disappearance of Malaysian Airlines Flight 370, there exists a shocking gap in airline security: Airlines are not required or even allowed to check for stolen or lost passports against the list maintained by Interpol (the International Criminal Police Organization), the world police agency.

Interpol’s high-tech registry has 40 million entries.

Your baggage can be inspected, you may be patted down or even undergo a revealing head-to-toe body scan. Yet more than 12 years after the terror wrought by skyjackers on 9/11, official travel documents almost always get nothing more than a quick visual glance.

“The result is a major gap in our global security apparatus that is left vulnerable to exploitation by criminals and terrorists,” according to Ronald Noble, who is the secretary general of Interpol.

He issued this warning just 12 days before the lax security became an international scandal following the March 8 disappearance of the jetliner bound from Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, to Beijing with 239 people on board.

It was found that two Iranians had boarded the Malaysian Airlines flight with passports stolen in Europe.

The fake documents went undiscovered beforehand.

Based in Lyon, France, Interpol has 190 member nations. But only the United States, Britain and the United Arab Emirates make significant use of the list of stolen or lost passports, which is accessible by high-tech means.

The United States searches the database — which averages 60,000 annual hits — over 250 million times a year

Until now, however, the Interpol registry has been restricted and disclosed only to governments and not to airlines or other third parties. Nor have nations cooperated to insist on systematic usage and wide sharing of the data.

The stumbling blocks include political hostilities, privacy concerns and the lack of police resources.

As a result, international travelers boarded planes last year more than 1 billion times without having their passports checked through Interpol.

Four of every 10 passengers worldwide are not screened against the database for document matches.

This folly must not be allowed to continue.

Interpol is preparing an initiative that could allow regular private access to the registry by members of the travel, banking and hospitality industries around the world.

Tightening the huge international lapse in airline security is long overdue.